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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/05/22/marthe-hoffnung-cohn-dead/
Marthe Cohn, a Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany, Dies at 105
(Washington Post) Harrison Smith - Marthe Cohn, a French Jew, was asked to spy for the French army in late 1944. She had already lost her fiance, a member of the French resistance who had been tortured and shot by the Germans outside Paris. One of her younger sisters, Stephanie, had also been killed - arrested and deported to Auschwitz while trying to help people escape to unoccupied France. Cohn had managed to survive the Nazi occupation with help from false identity papers provided by a friend. She was also aided by her blond-haired, blue-eyed appearance and her fluency in German, which she learned as a child in Metz, a French city not far from the border. After joining French military intelligence, she was able to cross enemy lines and spend a month in Germany, where she passed as a German nurse while making small talk with SS officers and Nazi soldiers, gathering information about troop movements. During one encounter, she told the German soldiers that she was terrified about the prospect of an Allied invasion. "They told me not to worry," she said. "And then they told me in precisely which section of the Black Forest the German army was waiting for the Allies." She also revealed that German troops near Freiburg were withdrawing from the fortified Siegfried Line. Her spying earned her France's Croix de Guerre and was credited with saving the lives of Allied troops. More than 50 years later, she was named a knight in the Legion of Honor, the country's highest order of merit. Cohn died May 21 at the age of 105. She shared her story at schools and community centers across Europe and the U.S., where she worked as a nurse after the war.